


a nameless way of living

by TolkienGirl



Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Compulsion, Damon in his villainous stage, Episode: s01e03 Friday Night Bites, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Dubious Consent, Non-Linear Narrative, POV Second Person, title from a Muriel Rukeyser poem
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-16
Updated: 2020-12-16
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:00:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28104363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl
Summary: Your own fear is buried so deep that it isn’t even a memory. [Damon considers Elena.]
Relationships: Caroline Forbes/Damon Salvatore, Damon Salvatore & Stefan Salvatore, Elena Gilbert/Damon Salvatore, Katherine Pierce/Damon Salvatore
Comments: 1
Kudos: 9





	a nameless way of living

Memory is a funny creature. Only half-hunted, escaping with a bullet in its belly, leaving a trail of blood.

_I’m sorry. About Katherine. You lost her too._

You’re cold-bodied, cold-veined, sprawled across the road they killed you on, waiting for her. You used to think death was an ending. You saw musket-balls take the shape out of men’s faces, the color from their eyes. Before Katherine showed her teeth, yours chattered with nervous chills. You were dying, over and over, drowning except when you had to breathe for Stefan’s innocence; except when you could bury your guilt in her arms. That was how you tried to come home from the war.

( _Miss Katherine_. She flashes red and white and smoky dark, and the pain closes around you and reminds you just how alive you are.)

So. The girl rises in the mist and you rise from the graveyard dirt and gravel. You make her forget, because memory is a funny creature, and you can chain it. You can let it go. Off it runs, along with the color in her eyes.  
  


It doesn’t work a second time.

_I don’t know what happened in the past, but let’s get one thing straight...I am not Katherine._

You’re under artificial lighting, smelling dry-rot and potpourri and pasta water. Smelling the copper under her skin. She is looking up at you through her hair and saying, _What was she like_? with the same mouth but different eyes. You are not tongue-tied, because you are dead in all ways but one, empty in all endings but one, lost in all worlds but the one where you are going to bring the future out of that goddamned tomb.

 _What was she like?_ You can scarcely put a vision to it, except the one standing next to you. Memory is a funny creature, but you give it words.

_Complicated, selfish, at times not very kind…_

You’re old and hungry and cruel, so much so that there are glass-slivered moments when you are none of these things. Stefan, virtuous sap that he is, cannot comprehend this. _Evil is as evil does_ , or something like that. You can never be lighthearted, by his metric.

 _Our hearts are one hot drink away from being calcified_ , you tell him. _High horse giving you a cramp yet?_

Goldilocks squirms and cries and argues, and you don’t care. You’ve never cared about anything but the tomb. You _are_ dead, after all.

But so is Stefan.

You haven’t done _enough_ , that’s the trouble. Haven’t instilled enough terror in the hearts of men and your nagging little brother. Whiskey doesn’t dull the edge, blood leaves you primed like a runner for a race, with no path before your feet.

The house is just as soulless and vast as ever it was.

You make a few more bodies. Just enough to piss Stefan off. Your own fear is buried so deep that it isn’t even a memory. You can’t call it to mind without great effort; it is a dog too far gone to whistle for. You decide that Elena is something to be taken, just like everything else in the world except _a way out_ , and you look deep—deep—into her when you say,

_You want to kiss me._

(The road rises up. The house echoes. The tomb is shut.)

Elena slaps you clear across the face. It—stings. Just how alive—

_You lost her too._


End file.
